Bob:

We had planned to do the Prado art museum, and after seeing the lines on the previous day we decided to definitely try to get there early, but first we used the kitchenette in our suite to hard boil some eggs to go with the breakfast cereal, milk, bread, and yogurt. It was nice to have real cutlery, dishes, and a table to have breakfast on. Hustling over to the Prado about 15 minutes before it opened at 9:00 a.m., Monika got in the line for General Entrance tickets and I got in the line for the special Goya exhibit tickets, which turned out to actually be valid for the entire museum's collections.

We started off with the special Goya exhibit, and it was quite powerful. Clearly the man had a complete command of classical painting styles, which he used to outstanding effect in painting portraits of the rich, powerful, and famous folks in Spain from the 1770s to 1823. Those portraits plus commissioned works to decorate various royal palaces or churches seemed to be how he paid the rent, so to speak. He also used his portraiture talents for a few friends and family members, and the Prado's collection showed he had a well-deserved fame for natural and lifelike portraits that revealed key aspects of the sitter's personality, proclivities, and so forth.

Monika:

Bob:

But Goya lived during the French invasion and occupation of Spain under Napoleon in the early 1800s, and the experience of that warfare strongly marked his work. Partly that influence appeared in large, vivid canvasses about some of the critical events of the war. Those paintings were unbelievably powerful because his artistic talent allowed him to portray something that was more emotionally realistic than a simple picture of the event would have been. The emotional evocation of the horrors of war was so strong as to be viscerally disturbing to me, and Monika, who is far more sensitive on that topic than I am, really couldn't take it at all.

Goya's depictions of the effects of war were also shown in the collection of etchings called Las Desparates, where he depicted the atrocities committed by the French troops against the Spanish and by the Spanish partisans against the French troops. About 15 or so of those were put in one room, and I had no idea there were so many ways that people could be bestially cruel to one another; I was really getting sick by the end of that room. Goya was not, however, single-mindedly either pro-Spanish Bourbons or pro-French. He really seemed to be a liberal humanist of the type so despised by the religious right wing of the U.S. and was distressed when the restored Spanish monarchy threw out the French-inspired Constitution of 1808, cancelled any of the human rights established under the French rule, and restored the thugocracy of the Inquisition to torture and destroy anyone guilty of liberal thinking.

Monika:

Bob:

After a much needed break for lunch, we spent another few hours touring the exhibits in the rest of the Prado, which contained a tremendous collection of art plus a few rooms of classical Greek or Roman sculpture on the ground floor. If you ever get to the Prado (and you should if you like art), make sure to also look at some of the marble inlaid tables that we saw down in the sculpture section. I've done stained glass and I know how difficult it is to grind glass down into complex curves and points without breaking it, so I was astonished at how those artisans could make intricately cut pieces of thin marble slabs fit together almost seamlessly. I was hard put not to trace the lines of the designs with my fingers just to make sure it was real.

There are about 102 display rooms in the Prado, and our legs were really aching when we had visited all of them, about 6 hours after we began. Aside from the ancient sculptures, the artwork in the Prado concentrates on the period from the 1400s to the early 1800s. Much of the early work was religious in nature, with the same basic biblical elements being done again and again and again, and outside of that most of the work was again portraits of the rich, powerful, and famous. Probably because I had been sensitized by seeing Goya's anti-war work, I was struck by the fact that in those earlier works war was uniformly depicted as great, grand, and glorious with the Good Guys always winning in a bloodless victory over the Bad Guys and no side effects on the innocent non-combatants. With paintings like that to act as propaganda, no wonder so many people were ready, willing and able to throw their lives away in war after war after war.

In this sea of predictable paintings, we occasionally also found some aspect of real life depicted by various artists, or just something really far out or puzzling. Valazquez's "The Spinners", for example, had 3 women spinning yarn in he foreground, a mundane task that he used as foreground in his overall composition. But Hieronymous Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights" was, for me at least, surrealistic. That triptych has a left hand panel apparently depicting Heaven or Paradise that is just pretty and tranquil and all that. The middle panel of the garden of earthly delights is rather bizarre, with couples inside bubbles and weird things floating around in the air and other inexplicable elements, but still with a pleasant tone on the whole. But the right-hand panel apparently depicting Hell is just something out of a bad nightmare, with elements like a pair of floating ears with a knife blade sticking out between them and other strange things. Was Bosch taking some kind of hallucinogenic drugs? The only thing I have seen like it is Salvador Dali's work with melted clocks and suchlike things, and I've always wondered about Dali, too.

We finished the Prado and limped home for the day around 3:00 p.m. Signing on to the internet, we were happy to find email from Helen and Jeff, so we sent off some messages to them as well as Vickie, Sue, Don, and George just to try to keep in touch with the folks we had met on the cruise. We also took turns using the computer to update our journals and read a bit until it was time to turn in for the evening.

Monika: